Rant incoming:
You know what's serendipitous about me seeing this? It came right after someone I follow suddenly decided to post some negative thing tangentially related to mormons, and of course several people in the notes had to make that the main spotlight. Love that.
I seldom post stuff related to my religion for two reasons: 1. I don't want to be perceived as proselyting, because that's not my intention, and 2. when you post something like that publicly, you open yourself up possibly receiving tons of hate. The latter has increasingly reinforced #1 over the years.
People have always perceived us as some kind of "weird" or "other." There has always been misinformation out there, people who profit off of that misinformation, or people who think they know more than they actually do. That isn't new. But shows like Secret Lives, and social media have basically magnified all that into a morbid, parasocial obsession that's, quite frankly, yet another example of peak internet brain rot.
Talking to these people, you would think that our entire history can be summed up by "con man, polygamy, child brides, and racism" and that our culture is just "mind control, creepy old white dudes, tradwives, soaking and dirty sodas."
Let me tell you, as someone who grew up well before the internet blew up into what it is now (who's lived across the US, known members from around the world, gone through periods of inactivity, multiple faith crises, and has in fact done plenty of her own research pre-2013 gospel topics essays) I cannot begin to describe how exhausting it is to interact with people who think like this.
Even if you try to correct them on something that's just objectively factually incorrect, oh no no no no, that doesn't matter. You can't be trusted because you're still brainwashed. Nothing you say, do, or think is born out of genuine belief, lived experience, or critical thought.
No, apparently, they know better than you, and think they can pathologize almost anything you do because they're more enlightened than you for... I don't know... listening to some true-crime style podcast on cults, watching Alyssa Grenfell or whatever's on Hulu these days, reading anonymous horror stories from reddit, looking at 19th century tabloids about how awful the mormons were, etc, accepting all of that at face value, and then calling it "research."
Never mind how sensationalized and exploitative the true crime media ecosystem is, even just generally. Never mind that in literally no other topic would "reading stuff on reddit" be considered objective research. Never mind that the whole concept of "brainwashing" itself is pseudoscience that's long since been debunked. Never mind that the word "cult" has become so loaded with prejudice, that there is a reason why you don't see a lot of "cult studies" in the primary scientific literature, and that the sort of rhetoric you see spread by self-proclaimed "cult experts" has its roots in a white-evangelical moral panic from the 1970s. Yes, even Steven Hassan who came up with the BITE model (which is not even peer reviewed btw) got his start in abusive deprogramming methods that were born from that era. Yes, even Alyssa Grenfell will unknowingly (or knowingly, honestly sometimes it's hard to tell with her) regurgitate talking points from that era too.
They don't bother to try and deconstruct any of that, but then have the audacity to try and lecture me about how I'm stupid for not deconstructing... which, in this context, can basically be translated into "Your perspective on your own mormon upbringing, aka your own lived experience, is only valid insofar as you stop being mormon."
And this isn't even getting into the quiet racism this crowd exhibits too. Seriously, they'll go on and on about how racist mormons are, but let me tell you... the volume of nasty, patronizing white-savior comments I see coming from these same people whenever they find a POC Latter-day Saint on social media is astounding. Again, talking to these "experts" who've allegedly done tons of research on us, you'd think all mormons were white until recently, and that's just not true. Even with the priesthood/temple ban (which yes, I agree, is a horrible stain on our history that should never have happened), there have always been people of color within our church. Pretending like they weren't there and/or minimizing their voices, or acting like they can't make their own informed choices about what religion they want to identify with is literally a form of erasure, stop it!!!
I'm tired. I'm tired of people acting that is normal, acceptable public discourse, because it isn't.
Which is not to say that you have to like mormonism, let alone convert. But you know what... there's a lot of things that I do not like about aspects of other religions or atheism as well. Every religion has skeletons in its closet. And yet, I would never treat any of them the way these hyper fixated pseudo-experts have treated me or my community. You know why? Because it fucking sucks, and it's not okay.
Lastly, to anyone who might come along to say "But you're a cult!" .... Here's a radical thought, treating people like shit because *you* think they're weird and stupid is not the flex you think it is. Grow up.
